Short Story Contest powered by Half Baked Beans- Love

Here is the winning entry on the third stage of love-Love by Nabodita Ganguly.

The fact that
relationships can last for more than a year, has always been scary to me. Don’t
people get bored after a long time? Isn’t it claustrophobic? Everytime I get
cynical towards love, my sister says it is love which will resusciate me back
to its power. I always ignore her, because to be honest; the idea of forever is
very strange to me.

Now that it’s my ninth
relation, and it has lasted for nearly a year; my girl friend asked me to marry
her.

She is a woman of
dignity, witty, real. However the very idea of marriage makes me suffocated.
She repeatedly asked me to marry her, and I kept on telling her that I don’t
like all this. She gave me examples of perfect couples whose marriage worked,
she told me how love increases forever, she told me that marriage is only a
name of love; but I didn’t listen to her.

Conversations of this
type always way lay me with sadness, nervousness. Slowly, I noticed that there
was irritation in her tone. She kept asking me why I didn’t want to marry.

“Because I don’t
understand this concept of love. I do not believe this very concept of
forever,” I shouted loudly.

She looked at me and
gave a sarcastic smile. She said that she would wait for a week for an answer.
She would tame her wild soul with the hope that I will accept her, but if I
didn’t, she would break our little world, and depart.

I didn’t know what to
say, or how to say. I kept on sweating, just then she said, “When we are in
love, we look into the person’s eyes and we instantly fall for them. We vow to
protect them by our love, we promise to stay with them for forever. Because
everyday, we discover a new person from the person we love.”

As she kept saying, my
phone rang, and my brother in law said that it was time. Hearing it, I left the
spot and rushed my way to the hospital. I didn’t even say a proper “goodbye” to
the person who was madly in love with my soul.

By the time I entered
the hospital, it was born. Rather she was born, my sister gave birth to a baby
girl. My mother gave the child in my lap.

As I took her, there
was vicissitude in me. I became responsible, took her properly. I never
imagined something so beautiful can be born. She looked total like a nymphet,
looking at her face I fell for her. Looking into her small eyes, I vowed to
protect her for forever. I promised to mollify her with my love for forever.

It was this infant
soul, who made me accept my girlfriend’s proposal. It was she who made me
realise the true aura of love. My sister was right, it was love which made me
understand it’s true value.